Synthetic nanoparticles based on peptides/proteins, lipids and polymers offer great promise for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications, such as drug delivery, new vaccine formulations, tissue engineering and protein therapeutics. They are also highly desirable for the food and cosmetic industries. Various approaches have been developed to prepare nanoparticles with different levels of success such as liposomes, dendrimers, crosslinked polymeric nanoparticles, polymersomes and synthetic virus-like nanoparticles using recombinant proteins. The polymeric approach tends to give large particles and there are limited reports to produce particles with sizes around 10-20 nm. As the major carrier for many therapeutic systems, liposomes can form nanoparticles with a wide range of sizes down to 20-30 nm and are commonly used for drug and gene delivery as well as skin cosmetics care and food industry. The liposome formation process is not instantaneous and typically involves multi-step procedures such as sonication, extrusion etc. Yet, the liposomes tend to form large aggregates and require optimization in particle size, polydispersity and shelf-life time. Synthetic virus-like nanoparticles, such as Inflexal V®, can be made using recombinant proteins that self-assemble into 20-100 nm diameter nanoparticles capable of displaying multiple antigenic peptides on their surface. However, extensive purification is required to remove residual compounds to avoid immune responses. In addition, they require refrigeration to prevent protein denaturation. Both limitations result in high cost and prevent their extensive utilization. Thus, it still remains a significant challenge to prepare monodisperse nanoparticles with diameters in the range of tens of nanometers that are stable at room temperature at low cost. Surprisingly, the present invention meets this and other needs.